


Places You Won't Follow

by zeldadestry



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Community: 100_women, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 13:19:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7053340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/pseuds/zeldadestry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since Jess met Sam, she’s considered him to have the saddest, most troubled eyes of anyone she’s ever known, but Dean looks just as haunted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Places You Won't Follow

**Author's Note:**

> prompt 6, "past", for 100_women fanfic challenge

This isn’t the typical Thanksgiving break but it’s been awesome, so far. Since Jessica’s parents are in London right now and their friends are all off with their own families, she and Sam are celebrating on their own, living each day off like it’s the weekend. They get to sleep in as late as they want, slip on comfy clothes when they finally do wake up and go to one of their favorite restaurants for brunch and bloodys, spend the afternoons hiking or visiting museums or just curling up together on the couch to read, and going out each night to see movies or bands play, all the good stuff they can’t necessarily fit in when they’re busy, and then getting home laughing and buzzed and ready to strip and get their hands all over each other.

“We seriously needed this,” she says, when they wake up on Saturday, because classes start again on Monday and that means they’re back to their usual routine tomorrow. “I’ve been stressed.” She’s leading the witness, kind of, and it’s something she does with him all the time. She notices what he seems to be dealing with and then she claims that issue as her own, hoping that sympathy might lead him to talk about it. “I finally had a chance to catch up on my sleep. I kinda had insomnia the last month. Bad dreams that woke me, you know?” 

Sam just hmmms, and shrugs, and she wonders if he seriously thinks she hasn’t noticed that he’s been having trouble sleeping for weeks now, at least since Halloween. 

 

They’re walking back home after a late lunch and Jess is already transitioning back to real life mode, reviewing her upcoming schedule, planning out the chores and items on her to do list she needs to finish first, but she’s not so lost in her own thoughts that she doesn’t immediately notice when Sam pulls his hand free of her own.

“What the fuck?” Sam growls, and Jess instinctively gets behind him. There’s a guy, standing outside the front of their building, older, grizzled, and she’s never met him but Sam obviously has.

“That’s not your dad, right?” she asks. He doesn’t look like the only picture she’s seen of the man, but there’s something similar about the guy.

“Not really,” Sam says, but doesn’t explain what that means. “Stay here.”

When they first got together, she’d argue with him about shit like that, the few orders he would give her, because, seriously, no one else in her whole life has ever tried to tell her what to do, but she’s learned to trust Sam’s intuitions. 

When Sam reaches the stranger, neither immediately speaks. The two of them just stare at each other for a long moment and then Sam starts shouting. “God damn it, Bobby! Which one?” He grabs the man by the jacket, and Jess runs towards them, afraid of what might happen next. “Which one?” 

“I’m sorry, Sam,” is all the man says. 

Sam collapses, there’s no other word for it. He falls to his knees, covers his face with both his hands, his shoulders shaking. “Sam,” Jess says, crouching down beside him. She reaches for his wrist, wanting to draw his hands away so she can look into his eyes, but he jerks at her touch. 

“Don’t,” he hisses. He takes to his feet, wipes his cheeks and his nose with his sleeve, and says, without looking at either of them, “I have to- I’m gonna take a walk.”

“Let me come with you,” she pleads.

He shakes his head. “Don’t.” 

He takes off running and she’s just made up her mind to go after him when the man takes her arm. “What?” she snaps, pulling away from him, just like Sam did to her.

“I think you should let him be alone, Ms. Moore. Just for a while.” He gives her what she’s sure is supposed to be a comforting smile and says, “He’ll be back,” but his voice carries as much doubt as she’s feeling.

“Who are you?” she says, taking him in from his mud-covered boots to his busted baseball cap. She doesn’t want to be rude, it’s just a lot to absorb, this stranger who’s suddenly turned their whole lives around. “I mean, we haven’t met.”

“My name’s Bobby Singer.” He puts out his hand and she’s not such an asshole that she doesn’t shake it. “I’m a friend of the family’s.”

“The Winchesters,” she says. Sam seems to hate the name, she knew him for a month before she learned his surname and he hadn’t even volunteered it, she’d needed to ask. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Please call me Jess.” He nods. She finally notices the truck parked two dozen feet away, the one that’s significantly more worn than the rest of the vehicles on the block. “Did you drive here?”

“Yes, from South Dakota.”

“Is that where you live?” 

“Yup.”

“I, um- the Badlands are beautiful.” He nods. “Would you like- why don’t you come inside and we can have a drink?”

“I’d appreciate it.” 

He lets her take the lead, staying behind her as they walk up the stairs, into the apartment, and through it to the kitchen. “Let me get you something.” She looks in the fridge. “We have soda, juice, beer?” 

“Anything stronger?”

“Yeah. Take a seat.” She gets glasses down from the cupboard and pours them each a glass of her father’s scotch. He stockpiled it for years and finally realized, at fifty or so, that he had more than he’d ever be able to drink, at which point he started giving it out to friends and family. Jess puts a glass down in front of their visitor and then sits down at the kitchen table across from him. “What happened?” Bobby rubs at one of his eyes with the heel of his palm and she realizes how worn he looks, exhausted. Whatever this is, it’s obviously a bad loss for him as well. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“Yeah.” He sighs. “It was an accident.”

“A hunting accident?” Sam said something once about that being the rest of his family’s only real interest. The reaction from Bobby is strange, though, he peers closely, even suspiciously, at her and seems to be on the verge of asking a question. “Or some other kind of accident?”

“No, it was hunting.” Bobby finishes his glass and she passes him the bottle so he can refill with as much as he wants. 

“What happened?”

“Bear,” Bobby grunts. “Sliced him right open.”

“Will he recover?” Bobby lifts his eyes towards the ceiling and she waits, they both do, while he blinks back the tears. When he drops his gaze back down to her, she doesn’t even need to hear the words. “It’s already over,” she says. Now she drains her own glass. “I’m sorry.”

“That boy,” Bobby says, “he had such a good heart. Didn’t really show, unless a person was looking, but, once you saw it-”

“Dean?” she says, and the name feels strange in her mouth, she’s never said it before and Sam mentioned it only once, after she and Becky finally made up, following an argument so viscous that, for a whole week, Jess wasn’t sure they could ever be friends again. 

“You guys are like sisters,” Sam had reminded her, as they lay curled together in bed. Both his arms were around her and his interlaced hands rested on her belly. She traced his long fingers with the tips of her own. “She’s like your sister and so you’ve gotta make it right with her because, if you don’t, you’ll never-” He shuddered. 

“What is it?” she whispered. “Tell me.”

“Dean and I-”

“Who?” she said, unthinking, and the moment was so delicate that her one word was enough to break it. He checked out, there were no other words for it, she could feel the change in his body, they were still pressed close together but he was gone, had left her alone. “Is that your brother’s name?” 

“Yeah,” was all he had left to say.

Bobby’s staring down at his own hands holding his glass and Jess recognizes that this is her chance to ask some of the many, many questions she has and get better answers than the big fat blow off she usually receives from Sam. She considers her options but realizes that, no matter how much she cares about Sam, no matter how curious she is, she’s got too much pride to go begging for what he won’t tell her. She finally settles on asking, “How’s Sam’s father?” She can ask that, it’s common courtesy. “Is he alright?”

“He ain’t really been alright since his wife died,” Bobby says, and she thinks she might see pity in his eyes, pity directed her way.

I’m not a child, she wants to say, tempted to defend herself by listing tragedies of her own, because every family has them, in some measure, right? Instead, she relies on the protocols she knows, the simple questions sense and good manners dictate. “When’s the service?”

Bobby shakes his head. “Already salted and burned.”

“Excuse me?”

He clears his throat. “I meant the cremation,” he says. “Just an old way of putting it, that’s all.”

“Oh.” She smiles at him. “I actually study slang. I mean, I took a class on it. And I got to keep a diary noting when I’d hear words and phrases I didn’t know. It actually happened a lot less often than you’d suppose, because mass media doesn’t make use of regionalisms, generally, but Sam was a good source for me! Gank, I got that from him, I’d never heard it before. And he used to say Cristo instead of bless you when people sneezed.”

“Did he?” A corner of Bobby’s lips lift. “Smart kid.”

Silence falls between them. Jess gets up and takes her glass to the sink. There are some dishes left in there from the ice cream she and Sam ate last night, the coffee they drank this morning, and she washes them slowly, dries them with a soft pink dish towel before putting them away in the cupboards. When she turns back to Bobby, he’s pouring another drink. “Are you hungry?” 

“Are you?”

He puts a lot of kindness into those two words, a sympathy she suddenly realizes she needs. No, she never met Dean, no, Sam almost never spoke of him, and yet she feels this, too. She shares their sadness. She nods. “And tired,” she admits.

“Why don’t you rest?” He gets up from the table. “I’ll rustle up some dinner for us, something that’ll keep on the stove for when Sam gets home.”

“Thank you so much,” she says. He clasps her shoulder. “I can’t believe you drove all this way.” 

“Something like this- I could never have done it over the phone. I’m here, for as long as he needs me.”

“Thank you.”

 

When Jess wakes up from her nap, Sam still hasn’t returned. She’s worried but Bobby isn’t surprised and she has to admit that he very well may know better. Bobby serves each of them a big bowl of chili, topped with shredded cheddar, and he smiles for real when she asks for seconds.

After dinner, he brings out an envelope from his duffel bag and hands it over to her. “Took these photos of Dean just a few weeks ago. Figured you and Sam might like to have them.”

Since Jess met Sam, she’s considered him to have the saddest, most troubled eyes of anyone she’s ever known, but Dean looks just as haunted. 

 

When Jess gets into bed late that night, she curls up on her side and looks at the empty space to her right. No matter how often Sam says, “What would I do without you?”, this is her reality. When shit gets bad, he doesn’t turn to her, he doesn’t turn to anyone, as far as she knows, he goes off by himself. There’s nothing wrong with that, in theory, but, in practice, it means she’s alone. 

 

She wakes up to the front door banging shut and immediately gets out of bed. The door to the bedroom is open and she can hear voices from the living room.

“You’re lying to me,” Sam says. 

“Sam-” 

“I knew, I knew there was no way Dean was gonna go down on some ordinary hunt.”

“Every hunter has bad days, there’s no shame in it.”

“And, even if I didn’t know he’s too good for that, your poker face isn’t as good as you think. I knew you were gonna lie to me before you opened your god damn mouth.”

“Watch your tone.”

“What the fuck are you even doing here?”

“Trying to keep you from throwing your life away.”

“It’s not your choice, Bobby, it’s not your choice.” 

“If you don’t watch yourself- you play right into their hands. They did this to draw you out, we both know it.”

“I don’t care. What they did- they’ll pay, I’ll make sure of that.”

“Sam, we need to-”

“You’re not part of this.”

“You need to listen to me. Whatever you’re thinking right now, whatever you’re planning-” 

“Sam? We really don’t have time for this.” That’s a woman’s voice, a voice Jess doesn’t recognize and that worries her because her friends are Sam’s friends and vice versa. She hurries into the living room but doesn’t make it through the doorway before Bobby swings out an arm and traps her behind it, his eyes never leaving the woman’s face. She’s blonde, looks to be around their age, and she’s dressed in a leather jacket, jeans, and black boots.

“What’s going on?” Jess says. She might have only known Bobby for a few hours, but she already trusts him to recognize trouble and, from the way he’s physically shielding her, there’s no question he considers this person dangerous.

“Go wait in the car,” Sam says to the woman.

“If you want to fix this, then we need to go. The longer we wait, the less leverage we have.”

“Go wait in the car, Ruby.” The woman rolls her eyes but turns around and walks out of the apartment.

“What’s going on?” Jess asks, again. With the woman gone, Bobby moves out of the way so she can reach Sam. “Are you ok?”

Sam hugs her, presses his hand to the back of her head for just a moment. “I don’t want you to worry,” he says. Then he lets go of her and walks past her, back into the bedroom.

She follows him, doesn’t even ask what he’s doing, just watches as he goes to his closet, sweeps aside shoes, old books, dirty clothes, and everything else littering the floor and opens a small door that she never knew was there. He brings a backpack up out of the hideyhole and tucks it under his right arm. “Sorry about the mess,” he says.

He won’t look at her. She doesn’t- she doesn’t even blame him. Something changed and now everything is fundamentally different for him. She gets all of that, even if she doesn’t exactly understand why it has to be this way. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Will you-”

“What?”

“Can you- go talk to Bobby? Turn on the water and tell him I’m in the shower, or tell him I’m crashed out in bed. I just need some extra time. He’s a good tracker so I need a head start. Distract him, ok?”

She doesn’t know where he’s going, but she knows it’s someplace she doesn’t want to travel. “Alright.” 

“Thank you,” he says, and holds out his hand.

She takes it into her own, squeezes. “Good bye, Sam.” 

He squeezes back and then, like they planned it, they both let go at once.


End file.
